1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a device management network system for managing operation status of network devices, a management server for constructing the device management network system, and a computer readable medium stored with a program which causes a computer to operate as the management server.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, due to price reduction in computers and LAN related devices, many companies are pursuing networking of various kinds of devices for business use, such as personal computers, printers, fax machines, etc. As a result, a task of administrating the network has attained considerable importance in order to maintain the conduct of business, and therefore, network systems have been developed, each of which allows a network administrator to inquire the operation status of network devices with his own computer.
For example, known is a network system attached a administration server which, when receiving a particular HTTP request from a client device running a Web browser, obtains information about operation status from a network printer, and creates and sends HTML data representing the operation status of the network printer to the client device.
This network system allows a user (a network administrator) to inquire the operation status of any network printer with his client device (Web browser). However, in the network system, even if two or more abnormalities (errors) has occurred in a network printer, the administration server sends back HTML data reporting that only one abnormality (an abnormality with the highest priority among the abnormalities actually occurred in the network printer) has occurred in the network printer to the client device. That is, this conventional network system has disadvantages in that the user cannot grasp every abnormality that has occurred in the network printer.